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I was told by someone that I am very quick at coming up with key questions. Just in case that's true, these are the questions burning a whole through my mind right now:

The big, tough question:

Saul Wainwright, who I work with at Innovating Finance Lab, mentioned that we do not have a concept for "infinite value" in our monetary system. This struck me as something as fundamental as Roman Numerals not having the concept of 0, and how Arabic numerals representation of 0 opened the door for what we now think of as mathematics. Whether we call this "abundance" or simply focus on the attributes that make intangible assets fundamentally different than tangible ones, I think this is the major questions: how do we think, talk, act, and codify in the systems that run our world, "infinite value."

Puzzle questions:

Where in our profit-driven society do we put those people who do not produce?

Challenge question:

How do we reinvigorate a neighborhood while maintaining the trusted relationships of those who have made it their home? Is there a way to have interlopers seize power without (further) disenfranchising those who are necessarily disempowered?

In his blog post, which was republished in the Huffington Post, UC Berkeley Public Policy scholar Robert Reich outlines the issues facing Wisconsin and the United States. In a nutshell, he argues that tax breaks to the rich and corporate entities have contributed to the already-severe impact of the recession to cause extremely tight budgets.

The standard argument for tax breaks is that allowing a more attractive environment for corporations will encourage them to continue to invest in the local economy and reside within the tax base. The logic is that by reinvesting, they will grow, and with additional growth comes additional revenues, and that even at a lower percentage, this will result in higher tax revenues in the future.

Let's pick that apart.

In times of crisis, we need short term cash-flow-oriented solutions at a community level in order to keep individual families functioning. Waste management, water systems, children enrolled in schools, and emergency services are all funded at a community level. Giving tax breaks is obviously in opposition to that goal of keeping the community functioning.The reasoning for giving tax breaks is to spawn future community revenues.

But in order to grow and to innovate, any company needs healthy employees who can think, have knowledge, are creative, understand processes, and have relationships built upon trust. Those components (health, skills, knowledge, creativity, processes, relationships, and trust) are intangible assets. So the best way to improve future revenues is the increase the intangible asset base that evenutally can produce financially productive assets.

And where are those components built? Health is built at the community level; it's based on food, clean water, sleep, access to medical care, and a supportive environment (emotionally and physically). While some skill and knowledge is built within companies, a lot is built in the formal educational system and more is built informally through interactions with one's peers during shared activities. Creativity is to some degree innate, but also developed in the same way knowledge is: through both formal education and informal community context, as detailed in depth in the seminal work of Richard Florida. Relationships and trust are reinforced through casual extra-work activities after (some) have been nucleated in a work context. And while processes are developed inside companies, companies also often look to the best practices of other organizations for process refinements (often enabled by faculty at educational institutions). Another overlooked intangible asset is that of the spiritual -- love, connection, vulnerability, passion, mission -- which provides the deep engagement human beings need to feel satisfied with their lives overall. Spirituality is rarely cultivated in a professional context.

Building intangible assets is crucial to the future success of the private sector. Since in large part they're built and reinforced within non-work communities, healthy communities are therefore also crucial to the future success of the private sector. When we dismantle the ability for the community to renew itself and rely on a relatively few wealthy individuals and private firms to fund the development of all these critical intangible assets, we vastly increase the risk that these assets will not be built, and in fact the financial competitive power of the United States will be tremendously weakened in the future.

No institution is perfect. Governments aren't, unions aren't, and corporations aren't. Individuals aren't perfect either. It is understanding the role of each in the overall economic landscape and optimizing for the production of intangible assets and their conversion to tangible assets that we will, as a society, rebuild a resilient global economy.

Chip Conley gives a good talk about he personally began to understand why intangible assets are an important thing for leaders to concentrate on.

There are a few things he says that I'd quibble with, but what really interests me here are two things that don't come up, but which his talk sparked:

(1) The equivalent generation to the Millenials -- the "Greatest Generation" -- were the people who took the precursor to the GDP, which was designed first as a measurement of national accounts, and then refined to manage World War II supply lines, and recast it as a country wide productivity measurement tool. "How many people don't have income or food?" is similar to "What happened to our systems: our food system? education? health system? protective services?"

So I wonder: Are we in the same historical place? Are the millenials poised to play the same role in bringing forward whatever the next measurement system will be? What WILL get us through this economic crisis? I doubt we'll pull out by looking even more critically at book value and EPS, just like I think our communities need to measure volunteerism at least as much as they need to measure household income.

(2) At the same time, many Millenials and GenX are trying to balance both the lowest and the highest of Maslow's levels: survival and self-actualization as it relates to one's community. It's transformation for extreme environments. There are many ways this is now spoken of, for example gift economy and relationship economy, but it's been around whenever there have been people who are relatively poor in increasingly oppressive environments who must help each other to survive. Just like during the depression.

Evidently, the next step is for BP to lower a box a mile underwater and then a big tube will contain the oil into a boat. OK, seems like a straightforward concept; it might work and keep working for several months, if they can get the box over the well in deep water using robots. Then the idea is that another well is drilled elsewhere in the meantime to relieve the pressure.

In the same article, Reuters reports: "Obama administration officials were reviewing the practice of granting exemptions from environmental impact studies for oil exploration projects deemed to involve little risk. The Minerals Management Service had exempted BP from a detailed environmental review of the project."

Now, I'm just not seeing how that would've caught the problem. The problem was failing to design redundant safety systems. I'm not sure how environmental impact would encourage them to be careful. Making more rules does not encourage following them. Making rules is about codifying the punishment, and we clearly do not punish people in financial leadership commensurate with their negligence.

BP is a British company, and you can check out the executive compensation, which, at about $5 million for 2009, is not extreme as these things go (Chesapeake Energy CEO made $100million in total compensation for 2009, compared to its average salary of $32k, a multiple of 3000x), and reasonably justified precisely because the head of BP does take on exhorbitant responsibility. But do we HOLD them to that responsibility? What seems to happen is that we decide, "Well, hey. Tony Hayward, CEO, you got to the position where we pay you a lot of money, you MUST be a leader, and so we respect you, and if you err in a way that causes calamity, you'll land on your feet because we NEED our leaders to land on our feet."

But we don't. We need our business leaders, the ones we aggrandize with the justification that they're taking on enormous responsibility, to behave responsibly or face the consequences. It's the leadership of the firm that sets the tone for making tradeoff decisions between community safety and shareholder profit-taking.

There's something seriously wrong with the system when making the same decisions at a far lower pay rate is more likely to get you the appropriately severe punishment. Isn't that what corruption is: Money buys a special set of rules?

On that note, Wells Fargo, paid its CEO $21 million worth of compensation. Relatedly, I just investigated buying stamps from the ATM. They do charge to sell you stamps, but they don't tell you. And they sell quantities like 18 or 36 that make it very difficult to multiply by $0.44 and realize that you're paying a premium (90 stamps for $47; that's how I realized there was a premium. For those of you who are math challenged, 100 stamps at $0.44 would cost $44, so 90 stamps would be less than that, and $47 is more than some amount that's under $44. So I knew I was going to pay a fee). Despite the fact that I needed the stamps, I couldn't bring myself to buy them; it was too disgustingly exploitative.

I must move my money, despite the amount of work it will take to set up elsewhere.

If you're interested in this topic (and why are you reading my blog if you're not?) go buy it! (Or ask your library to do so, and
then borrow it). It’s got a lot of anecdotes, it explains the methodology HIP
uses, it points you towards data sources… a very useful book! It’s a great gift
for people who wonder how to invest money or time, whether that’s a new
graduate, a career-changer, or an investor or philanthropist.

The HIP methodology makes it straightforward to
understand how to look at intangible assets within an organization and
relate that to financial performance. It will move you past the fundamental assumption of the Efficient Market, and as you can imagine, this jazzes me silly! (How? Why? Well, now it's time for...)

From the call alone -- I haven't read his book yet though I'm eager to -- the "long story short" is that the right hemisphere takes in
far more information and doesn’t categorize it, while the left brain requires
structure and simplicity. The author points out that the perception of our world is, specifically, subjective perception, and he believes that we're in a period of history where the left brain is dominating that perception at the expense of the right.

Because my mother was an artist and my father was a
Scientist (well, a psychoanalyst, but he philosophized about science) I have
been juggling exactly this issue for a long time.

In the field of social entrepreneurialism, we’re at the same
point, where some early adopters love the right-brained, fluid, holistic approach, but where the greater mass of the population would prefer something consistent and codified. ("Should" and "shouldn't" don't pertain; it's simply a matter of dominant perceptions.) Burnt out by “Top 5 Ways to be Sustainable” lists, they know
they need more substantive guidance, but to really understand the field still
requires a large commitment of time and energy, and whether you happen to be
a young grad trying to find a first job or an exhausted, middle-aged doctor, you just don’t really have time for
that.

So if the leading edge of the curve is deeply enmeshed in
right-brain stories, social enclaves, ad hoc TEDxVolcano flash forums, etc., what are
those people who approach managing their money with a “just tell me what to
do!” approach, to do?

This is where I believe the HIP Investor book, itself, shines. The
HIP methodology is used and useful for everything from public portfolio to
angel investment evaluation and management. But the book is a brilliant way to
communicate with those 99% of the people in this world who just want a practical way to integrate their feelings about their personal values with their practical financial challenges. The vast majority of people need a set of
practices to follow that will maximize their financial return and ensure their world is a
joyfully liveable place.

I interrupt my (ir)regularly scheduled postings to put up a conversation that fell out of a facebook thread begun by a friend who is a current teacher after a haitus. The first 8 years of her career were teaching third graders in East Oakland, during which time they went through a principal each year, and she was the senior-most teacher in the school. She is opposed to merit pay, because she perceives a huge problem in the proposals she's been aware of that would increase the current bias that teachers have in favor of bright, intellectually talented students. She's concerned that the neediest kids would be even less desireable as classroom assignments if teachers are financially compensated based on students' test scores.

I normally don't do things like this, but her response to my comment was an outrageously encouraging, "Jessica - can you please start setting educational policy? :) I love the ideas, and I don't know why merit pay has only ever been (at least in the proposals I've heard) tied to test scores." So I thought I'd share!

My response:

There's a perfectly good way to do it. "Merit" doesn't mean absolute test scores, it means improvement from before given a specific human being.

You look at how the kids are coming in; you look at what happens to the kids OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL during the year; you look at how the kids are going out. You do this for several years in order to get a baseline set of data from which to build expectations from.

And when I say "look at how the kids are doing," I mean on not only academic milestones, but on developmental ones too. We all know kids sometimes pause a bit in intellectual development while they "figure out" important things about their social worlds (at any level), or are consumed with awkwardness and self-absorbtion they grow a foot and change their biochemistry.Also, we can assess on any number of positive/supportive-of-strength personality profiling.

If we did this along with the teachers, we may even have a better way to do classroom assignments. (Every parent knows which parent is "better" or "worse" for their kid, even given a group of great teachers. I know my son performs like crazy for very demanding but extremely logical teachers. I didn't - I performed best for insightful and enlightening teachers; they didn't even have to cover the course material.)

Before we talk about merit, we should know what improvement looks like. It's a return-on-investment kind of metric (how much you get out compared to what you've put in), not an absolute amount. In fact that would INCREASE the desireability of teaching the needy kids, since improvements in any area count, and there's such a high opportunity for improvement. You can even incent the pay higher for getting kids below-grade-level to grade-level, assuming that's a harder role because you are likely to have complicating issues, at least self-esteem.

What it will also point out are the kids who are needy in a way a teacher can't possibly meet: they need healthcare or counseling or are chronically underfed. We would have to dovetail this into healthcare or other components, but it would also legitimize (financially) having those resources affiliated with the schools.

Well, do you agree with Bronwyn? Should I be setting educational policy? Before you answer, let me point you to another one of my hare-brained ideas: Education Reconceived where I just completely upend the curriculum taxonomy to make way for more relevant k12 coursework, and to build in a mechanism for change.

Here are my forecasts. The gist is this: it's going to be a decade of transformative change, and if we get stuck in the transitions, we'll protract the agony. If we can agree on broad goals and a process -- a life -- that involves respecting the journey to meet those goals and the people we travel with on our roads, then we may see some amazingly wonderful things emerge.

(1) Community and Government: Regardless of financial stability, social systems will crumble. Schools will bifurcate into "bare necessity" and "elite." At least one emergency (but probably several) will point out just how utterly incapable our medical system is at caring for everyday, insured middle class working people when large masses need hospitalization. Protective services (fire, police) will similarly face a few overwhelmingly impossible tasks because of weather-, earthquake- or social unrest-related crises.

The emerging solution to this will be that young people ("digital natives"), marshalled by the middle-aged ("diversity natives") will reach across the socio-economic aisles as never before. The challenges are so pervasive that only collaborative teams will be able to address them, and team-creation is easier than ever.

Look for alliances: alliances among young adults to solve specific innovation challenges; alliances between educational and other services to provide emergency resources; alliances to share personal resources, skills and expertise that tie communities back together again.

(2) Finance and Regulatory: Financial stability won't happen. No, not for the whole decade; not until the uncertainty surrounding global warming, toxicity, and other health issues are addressed -- at a minimum. In fact, an entirely new financial system -- or rather set of systems -- will continue to develop. It will be like "the internet in the 1990's" where decreasing numbers of people think the new system is a fad but the technology just isn't quite there to bring everyone on and up to speed.

That's called Social Entrepreneurship and Social Capitalism, and is represented by some amazing innovations that run the gamut from reinventing the traditional (investing a philanthropy's endowment is far more powerful as a social change agent than the relatively small amount they give away as grant money) to the novel (new risk management exchanges -- like the Housing Index, or the Peace Index), and the hybrid mechanisms of evaluating (paradoxically real) intangible assets and removing the focus from the abstraction, "money."

Look for innovations in just about everything, from traditional philanthropies treated as financial funds, grant money coming from for-profits, to new instruments like "social bonds," new exchanges, and the merging of data as it flows across the boundaries between corporate, governmental, and community organizations.

(3) Personal: Love and loving will continue to become increasingly traditional, with women shouldering immense caretaking loads due to smaller families that are widely spread out, higher incidence of everything from asthma to autism and alzheimers. Women will want to marry earlier and choose again according to "prospects" rather than sensitivity; men will want to capture younger women. Boomers will pool their resources and recreate communes where at least some children will be enlisted to provide caretaking services.

Amidst the resurgence of spirituality, where people recommit to some sort of faith: faith in God or society or their family, will be an eventual understanding of who is NOT the enemy. As people from the LGBT community, as immigrants, and as people formerly known as "minority" become included in the real work of monitoring and healing society, empathy will increase.

That said, the tolerance for uniqueness, "Too Much Information," will continue to contract. People will consider themselves very transparent but share less and less. A lot of us will block much from ourselves. The small children will watch this.

Look for a resurgence in the arts -- people who reconnect adults to their emotions -- for 2030.

"Social Capital" and "Social Entrepreneurialism" are evolving terms that have fuzzy meanings. So, instead of adding another definition, I'm going to give you a check list to help you decide whether you might be a Social Entrepreneur.

You're a Social Entrepreneur when:

(1) Whether for-profit or non-profit, your entity was founded and continues to exist in large part because of an identified social need, rather than a market need. There might be both; however without the social need, the entity just wouldn't be the same. The employees feel that their work is purposefully contributing to a greater good.

(2) That social need might be related to providing for the growth or development of any kind of intangible asset(s): intellectual assets, relationship building and conflict management, the environment (water, land, air), health -- mental, physical, and spiritual.

(3) Your entity is market-driven when it comes to finding resources: people feel it's within the entity's mission to find donors or capital because they have a transaction of value to offer. (This is in contrast to having people donate because they should support the entity due to moral or ethical reasons. That type of entity has a role also, but it's a charitable role.)

(4) There is a growth strategy, and it can encompass merging with another entity. With traditional non-profits, one persistent issue is that some non-profits have a concept of "territory," as though non-profits were monopolies in their particular specialty. In that case, merging with another entity -- even if services can be delivered more efficiently that way -- can be perceived as a loss of status (which is then related to difficulty in fundraising). In a socially entrepreneurial venture, there are other mechanisms to increase revenues, so more flexibility is available for merging separate operating entities.

What do you think "wealth" is? Do you think we make decisions based on what makes us and our community wealthy? How do you see this changing in the future?

I did this specifically to see what the community-at-large is beginning to think about the concept. SocialEdge invited me to continue the conversation in their forum.

As the community at SocialEdge is quite sophisticated in the topic, I wanted to post excerpts here. I urge anyone who is interested to read the expanded versions -- these are tiny excerpts -- of these very thoughtful posts, and contribute to the topic. Also, on LinkedIn I've just recently initiated a group Future of Wealth.

I am moderating a week-long forum on Skoll's SocialEdge on "What is Wealth." In that, I refer to the video of the interview Charlie Rose did of Robert Shiller. It was brought to my attention that as broadband is limited in areas where many Skoll participants are, that this would be useless to them.

So I sought to provide a link to the transcript, but unfortunately, Charlie Rose's site has a layout problem, and it's unreadable, at least to me. So I copied-and-pasted it here and cleaned up the tags until it laid out like it should.

Evidently, Dave did a talk, and there was brouhaha. I didn't see the presentation, and my response was written into a comment. While the comment is awaiting approval, I posted the link to Tracey Ullman to my Facebook profile. Well, I guess Tracey piqued interest.

The WSJ blog post, "Don't Be a Hero" discusses just how random things are right now. The financial markets have essentially turned into prediction markets, reflecting peoples' intuitions about what might happen next and rendering absurd the concept of a valuation model. It's almost as if we're in a volatility bubble. What does "we're providing liquidity to the markets" even mean now?

What can be done?

Instead of "don't be a hero," we need fund managers and traders to go long, to stop staring at the short-term catastrophe, and INVEST for two years from now (or longer). After all, what does risk management mean when the real risk is everything goes to he!! in a handbag? So, instead, imagine coming out the other side, after everything melts into a puddle and needs to be reformed: what should the economy look like in 5-10 years?

(HINT: Many of you will already know what I'm going to say, but for those who don't, this is not conceptually difficult. Productivity depends on having the pieces of the puzzle ready to go. Those pieces center around (1) trust -- which is built within relationships, which are themselves created through common purpose and shared activities, (2) knowledge, and (3) personal and environmental health. Find entities that build those components, and we'll be out of the deep dark hole much faster than if we continue to flail around. And it's not farfetched or out in wacky-land: here's the World Bank blogging from Social Capital 08.)

Financial pros: The social expectations are that financial losses will be huge, and that there's no rhyme or reason or good plays in this market. It's not a matter of being astoundingly clever or fast on your feet; in a way, you have carte blanche to do what you think best without any second-guessing. Stop looking for short-term opportunity -- it's all roadkill, and you're behaving like crows. Move this in the right direction.

Last week, I was SoCapO8,
a conference that was oversubscribed nearly 3-fold, where most people
have signed up in the past few weeks, post-financial catastrophe.

There is a lot going on in the social investment space, but I want to address, specifically, one item, since my for-pay job at the groupery
is a bit hectic due to a major upgrade (...and if you run volunteer
organizations, you should check it out! It's a powerful product and a
great team!).

Back on-topic: on Tuesday evening was The Economist Debate Series:

Motion: This house believes you can maximize social returns by maximizing financial returns. Two voices for, two voices against.

What is gone is gone. Did you just lose a lot of savings, an idea of how your future would be? Or did you get diagnosed with Stage IV cancer? Be sure to keep things in perspective. (And yes, today about 4000 people will get diagnosed with cancer in the US.)

Today:

Do something positive for your physical health.

Listen supportively to one person you know who you suspect is in a more precarious position than you are. Listen to them. Don't talk about yourself. They might not talk about what's going on, but they probably need to feel connected. If you don't do "talking," then do what you would do to lend support.

If you still have money to manage, invest not only with an eye to finding a safe harbor for financial capital in this Category V hurricane, but with an eye to where you're going to rebuild in the future.

Remember this: human beings can be safe and happy given kindness, trust, the ability to express their creativity and a way to fit into their society.

...and my personal favorite from a few days ago, a study of Republicans by psychology professor at the University of Virginia, written for liberals who grapple with why others make such different choices.

What Makes People Vote Republican - Jonathan Haidt. "(M)orality is
not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is
also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions,
and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the "it" to which they refer. " http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html

The markets are crashing. You might be feeling anxious, worried about how you going to weather this financial crisis, what you should *do* (or not??) to protect you and your family.

I will tell you.

If you build an airplane out of legos, and the airplane comes apart -- well it is very disappointing, you might feel crushed if you've worked very hard on it -- but you can still build a
new airplane because you still have the legos. Sure, it's not
an airplane until it's assembled, but the legos themselves are intact. When the airplane falls apart, it's time to make sure we don't lose any of the legos. We can even gather more legos,
get them organized, and start snapping those guys together for the rebuild.

That's what intangible assets are: the legos.

Those are not only the aspects of life that we truly can't do without,
those are the blocks from which productivity is built and risk is
managed. Examples of intangible assets are social relationships, trust, teamwork, knowledge, health, environmental resilience... the list goes on. Take stock of those things. Treasure them and build upon them.

And the economy will recover, because those building blocks, like legos, are still here in a very real way.

So, do this:

Build
social assets: Build positive relationships. Reconnect with people you genuinely enjoy spending time with. Reach out to new people. Help others who don't have much to rebuild with. Help the elderly who won't have time to wait out.
Protect your friendships. Have the courage to maintain a positive outlook during a time of misfortune. Don't argue, turn on each other, or let fear
or panic guide your behavior.

Build knowledge assets: While listening to other people, learn a little. Read what other people have to say; imagine things from their perspective. Of course, it's always a good idea to learn new things, just like it's always a good idea to behave honorably.

Build physical assets: Maintain health, both physical and emotional. Get whatever it is taken care of. Keep your sick kids home until they're no longer contagious. Make choices that benefit environmental health.

Build spiritual assets: Enjoy the arts: music, reading, whatever you prefer. Enjoy nature. Become grounded and connected with the teachings of the religion of your choice.

You may think, "Lovely. But what the heck am I supposed to do with what remains of my money?"

The answer is to do the same thing. Invest in building blocks. Will the financial ROI be good? Will it even be positive? That, I don't know, and even for successful investments it will depend on the time frame. But I do know this: If you are going to invest, carefully investing in areas that will benefit the ability of the world to solve problems and be productive will build the ability for the economy to recover.

Specifically:

Invest in technologies centered not only on energy production and efficiency, but on sensor and separations technologies (like filtration).

Invest in approaches that facilitate community cohesion, problem-solving, and the formation of partnerships and groups.

The situation with gas prices seems to be somehow representative of many peoples' current woes, ranging from getting financially slapped around, to environmental concerns, to the many issues surrounding the war.

So in the interest of giving something concretely useful to the extremely focused yet incredibly representative question of "what should I do about my car?" amidst the chaos of the world as we know it, I've made a simple "back-of-envelope" spreadsheet model:

Download the spreadsheet. Enter your annual miles, the expected annual gas price increase, the price of gas now, and two different car mileages to get a cost difference between the two cars.

For those who don't want to bother, I'll give you one little tidbit: in 6 years -- when my son graduates college -- assuming a 10% annual increase, the cost of gas will be $8/gallon. The difference in gasoline expense between a 35 mpg car and a 20mpg car will be $215/month for 15,000 miles/year. That's how much he would save owning a 35 mpg car; that's not including the actual cost for the gas, let alone the car itself.

Think of the implications. If you were a 22 year old, would you buy a car? How about a motorcycle? Would you choose to live in a city with poor public transportation?

And on that provocative note, let me point out a great new game by Institute for the Future, which as usual blows the lid off the concept of "provocative," Superstruct. It's part of their very popular Ten Year Forecast, widely subscribed to by large corporate clients and non-profits. It's open to everyone to play.

This is a game of survival, and we need you to survive.

Super-threats are massively disrupting global society as we know it.
There’s an entire generation of homeless people worldwide, as the
number of climate refugees tops 250 million. Entrepreneurial chaos and
“the axis of biofuel” wreak havoc in the alternative fuel industry.
Carbon quotas plummet as food shortages mount. The existing structures
of human civilization—from families and language to corporate society
and technological infrastructures—just aren’t enough. We need a new set
of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.

You can help. Tell us your story. Strategize out loud. Superstruct now.

I read a twitter post about how pro-choice women are backing McCain -- presumably over Hilary? I don't know... but I thought I'd go check out Barack Obama's mom.

There are a few great stories on her. What emerges is that she was a woman who spent grades 8-12 in the Pacific Northwest (the grandparents are northwestern, but Mom graduated from Mercer Island High School).

I see here (by reading the paper) despite TV media handwringing that he'll have trouble convincing anyone that Harvard-educated Obama can relate to the working class, turns out his white grandfather was working class, and his mom -- who was raised in a wealthier environment -- nevertheless worked at a Boeing plant during WWII.

Am I the last one to hear the news? Here it is in Time Magazine. What is wrong with the media that they can't understand that one man can have a whole bunch of different contextual influences?

NAFTA meets a bunch of corporate financial myopists in New Orleans while everyone's eyes are on Pennsylvania. The point I'll make here is that regulatory oversight is always subject to corruption, whereas robust systems which have a stable equilibrium that takes into account the human factors is much more likely to prevent rapistic environmental practices.

(Irrelevant answer: Not unless you believe Hillary is; Obama is GenX. But I'll get to that in a moment, and why that's spectacularly great news as my second point.)

First: Why GenX is the Entrepreneurial Engine

In the post Sanford makes a few points, mostly about the turning over of generational cycles that are coincident with technological breakthroughs.

So again to point this out: the technological breakthroughs you see are directly a result of GenX (and equivalent Reactive generations) opting out or being shut out by the generations that precede them. This forces a huge entrepreneurial upswell each time. Why are they shut out? It's complicated, but the theory has a lot to do with society in general becoming far less cohesive (riotous, actually) when the Reactive cycle (GenX) are children, and so the kids in these generations tend to grow up fending for themselves and without any clear social norms to strive for. It's one thing to leave home as a hippie when you're 15... there's a home to leave, standards that have been drummed into you. It's another to cobble together an ersatz family structure as you go.

The EPA estimated that it will cost polluting industries $7.6
billion to $8.8 billion a year to meet the 75-ppb standard, but that
rule will yield $2 billion to $19 billion in health benefits.

So, once again, we have this issue that we are accounting in a way that the right hand has no impact on what the left hand is doing, so even though we can see the connections -- and by "health benefits" just imagine how much innovation and productivity isn't happening to think about the magnitude of secondary effects -- we have no true "market mechanism" at work here.

When I was in MBA-land, we had a case in Cost Accounting regarding two Division heads having at it as they lobbied for their own interests. This is the same issue: the health people want one thing, and the industry lobbyists want another thing. As a society, we have no CEO, no ultimate arbiter of whether we're following the mission of the organization, because as a society, we don't have a single mission. This is where a "market" ends up being a helpful proxy for "wisdom of the crowds".

The good news is that we're on it, as a society; there are many people developing new ways to manage risk and evaluate sustainability in industry so as to enable us to reward those who "do good."

Underlying "doing good," though, is acting in concert with our own long-term self-interests. We all know that sometimes we don't sleep enough because there's something else more important (work? sick kid?...). As a society, sometimes we don't act sustainably because we're caught up in something else (economy? feeling self-protective?). Sometimes, it's the right decision, sometimes it's not.

Version 2.0 of the economy will be to have a global model that can account for all facets of humans' lives, not simply the accumulation of financial currency. Further, it will be robustly sustainable. Our current market system has many components that push us towards accumulating money; that's how the score is kept, after all. A sustainable system will have many components that push us towards a sustainable equilibrium, incenting us to "do good" simply by following those rules of the system that are now relegated to "morality" or "ethics," but which can (with effort) be part of the main measurement systems.

Here's a brilliant video describing how to deal with the "is it real or is it memorex?" questions about Global Warming.

In true Generation X leadership style, the argument -- devoid of idealism, only paying attention to pragmatic concerns -- is as follows: Who cares about what scenario is true or false? Who cares about who is right or wrong?

For those who don't know, I use Strauss and Howe's mapping of inflection points in trends to determine the end of the Baby Boomer generation; this puts people born in 1961 or after into the generation that follows. (As with anything else, though, part of culture is self-identification.)

The reason why Obama seems so fresh is that he is. He grew up, made choices and took risks in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous era, where there hasn't been a dominant culture that hands out roadmaps to buy into. Even the technological infrastructure of our lives-- energy, the environment, communication -- has been in such profound flux it's a profound challenge these days to think long term and act rapidly.

You can only do that if you have very firm principles AND avoid having judgmental attitudes about how things must be accomplished.

Salon News writes about Obama's message and decries it as elusive. He is a man of the times: a fine example of a non-Boomer leader.

Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging, futurist, and all 'round nice guy, came up with a fine gift for those who find such things amusing or useful. It's a bit of both, allowing us to define which particular type of apocalypse we're talking about.

The other news: This article enlightens us as to the nature of EU flights to the US and the data required for people travelling this-a-way. I'd particularly like to point out that one of the pieces of surrendered information is "any religious dietary requirements."

You'd think if nothing else the Ivy League schools would be a bit distressed about this. So much for the international nature of United States academia. Who would want their child educated at Harvard (or Washington State) if every time they went back to school you had to fret about them winding up on a no-fly list -- not to mention waking up at 2am after nightmares of their unsafe landing in Guatanamo.

I
realized that I am at odds with what appears to be society's prevailing
perception of Generation X as being the domain of anti-heros. I
frequently hear consternation expressed that we're going to have a
"shortage of leaders," which makes no sense to me for two reasons: first, there are already great leaders who have been born into the cohorts of Generation X. Second, the size of the generations are equivalent, as I've discussed earlier in this blog. I've also spoken
elsewhere about how the environment that forged the excellent Boomer
leaders was different than the environment that has forged the
excellent Generation X leaders (of today and tomorrow). The type of leadership needed yesterday and today is not the same type of leadership for today and tomorrow.

This isn't a new concept. Any MBA curriculum in
Strategic Management will discuss what types of leaders are more
effective in different organizational stages or when achieving
different goals.

But my son's class just studied Odysseus and, with it, the heroic journey. Revisiting the concept of the Hero's Journey, coupled with the perception of vast hordes
of Generation X who haven't yet moved into leadership roles has caused me
to realize that
there's a different way of looking at it: that they've (we've? Full
disclosure: I was born in 1962, interpret that as
you will) had a Hero's Journey but, for many people in the generation, the Return to Society has been
aborted, confounded, or just delayed.

When I was a child in elementary school, we were taught that the big difference between us and The Soviets (later referred to as the Evil Empire) was that the soviets could drag you out of bed in the middle of the night and send you somewhere never to be seen again, whereas we of course had due process that entitled you to have an attorney and all kinds of wonderful, civilized things. Further, we were told, you weren't even free to LEAVE the Soviet Union. If you tried to defect, well, the KGB could take your family and throw them into a prison camp... never to be heard from again. And if you went there, you were watched by the KGB.

Without hammering on Guatanamo = The Gulag, and of course Ted Rall did the eulogy for the Bill of Rights, I'd like to note an article regarding what was, for me, the most absurd part of the whole thing - the concept of "defecting." Will we now have defections from the US?

Aside from the obvious October Surprise hopes and anxieties, I think the brouhaha over Kerry's statement is that it hit a bit too close to home. Buried in The antiwar GIs at Salon, is the single sentence:

Yet the silent resistance runs deep, Madden believes. "It is more than
anybody would ever admit," he explains. "A lot of people are in the
military for life, because of their economic situation. But their hearts are against the war."

... because of their economic situation.

And how, in the US, does the story go? If you get an education you get a good job. If you don't.... Well, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. In reality, while an education certainly is no guarantee, the fact is without one there are not a lot of alternatives.

Since, beginning with the Reagan 'trickle-down' voodoo-economics years, the gap has grown so remarkably between wealthy and those who aren't, there are plenty of desperate, hardworking poor in the US. When Kerry accidentally exhorted the crowd to do well in school or risk taking a life-threatening, futile, dangerous job it was the truth.

So, this evening I discovered a University of Indiana study explaining that Jon Stewart covers as much ground as broadcast news, and this:

Denver, CO – SOLAR 2006. The American Solar Energy Society (ASES) announced today that it is one of nine organizations selected to take part in rock band Pearl Jam’s Carbon Portfolio Strategy. The Strategy is the newest component of Pearl Jam’s ongoing
efforts to promote renewable energy and carbon mitigation.

I've said before that the whole pre-emptive strike philosophy is like deciding a neighborhood has too many criminals so the best thing to do is to annihilate the whole neighborhood just to be on the safe side. No collateral damage is too much? That's absurd.

But I was reminded about the perils of being pre-emptively anti-dogmatic (got that?). If you've managed to miss the news, some little girls were killed in a violent death while at school. Truly hideous and appalling. However, I found the Amish community's response remarkable. Now, I would qualify "Amish" as dogmatic; but nevertheless they seem able to have a dogmatic belief in forgiveness, not a dogmatic belief in violent righteousness.

The Amish have also been reaching out to the family of the gunman.
Dwight Lefever, a Roberts family spokesman, said an Amish neighbor
comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended
forgiveness to them.

"I hope they stay around here and they'll have a lot of friends and
a lot of support," Daniel Esh, a 57-year-old Amish artist and
woodworker whose three grandnephews were inside the school during the
attack, said of the Robertses.

Huntington, the authority on the Amish, predicted they will be very
supportive of the killer and his wife, "because judgment is in God's
hands: `Judge not, that ye be not judged."

I think it's not only moderates, but also fundamentalist Christians who owe it to themselves to think again, more carefully, about whether a punitive mentality is conducive to a good society.

No doubt about it, Generation X has had bad press for fielding leaders. The one that set me off about a month ago was an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: - that there aren't as many of them as the Boomers (false; I ran the 2000 census data in an earlier entry)
- that there aren't any that have emerged (which is an odd thing
to say, as the founders of Google, eBay and Amazon are all officially
born of Generation X; and there has been a shocking amount of
media/aesthetic leadership that must be overlooked if Generation X's leadership capabilities are to be found lacking, en masse).
- that Generation X doesn't protest. (This is subject to interpretation: I
actually think the vehement acceptance or refusal to "drink corporate
kool-aid" -- where excessive profits is supposed to be good for mankind a
la Supply Side Economics -- is to GenX what the acceptance or refusal to
buy into the communist "domino theory" was for the Boomers. But that's just a
theory.)

In a fabulous book, "Doing School" How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students, by Denise Clark Pope, the author illustrates just how thoroughly kids have internalized our zeitgeist-driven anxiety that it's all slipping away.

It's a stressful read, but one that every parent and every educator should do, and frankly many older students would do well to read and discuss this book... if they have time.

Those of you who knew me in 1998 will recall my pronouncement that there would be a clamour for Bill Gates to run for President in 2008. This was before a lot of things happened, but I based it on expectations that environmental issues would be key and people would want someone who had "proven" they could "get things done," ruthlessness be damned.

Well, no need to run; he's become King. The Gates+Buffet philanthropy juggernaut involves giving away $3 Billion annually. While I both agree with and at times outright admire their effectiveness, I am a bit concerned by the precedent this sets: since the Foundation sets policy and accepts RFPs, it's really a top-down structure, and one that isn't representational.

You know... it seems that Boomers are in the news a lot these days, maybe it's because their first cohort is hitting 60 this year or maybe one of the last few, and it's true that there are a lot of Boomers when compared to the generation that preceded them. And most discussion talks about what that initial wave does as it hits the shore.

But the truth is that there's a generation that follows the Boomers, Generation X, that's at least as big. What happens when GenX takes over the secular leadership vacated by Boomers as they enter retirement? Isn't that, also, a story worth telling?

With the Al Gore cover story in the new issue of Wired, the other shoe has dropped.

Republicans used to be conservative in the sense of wanting small
Federal government, not only in taxation but more notably in power.
Republicans used to be for States' rights. Now the Republican agenda
includes a heavy alliance with religious mores that intrude into
individual choices.

Democrats used to be focused on administrative or regulatory solutions to many issues.

Moderates used to unite over the idea that it's better to concede
some issues to business in order to create "economic opportunity,"
while generally wanting to avoid having to support the infrastructure,
personally.

Has "Republican"
changed to "neo-con," which seemed to be about global security but
instead seems to be more about The Christian Mission? Has "Democrat"
changed to "neo-Green," as Wired asserts, which integrates economic
development with producing in harmony with the public good (a la
Corporate Social Responsibility)?

Beinin, a 58-year-old Jewish professor [at Stanford] who supports Palestinian rights,
knows he has enemies. Secure in his tenured position at an elite
university, he routinely criticizes U.S. leaders for failing to
understand why Americans are hated in the Arab world. He decries the
humanitarian costs of the Palestinian occupation.

The Ivy League-educated Beinin, former president of the prestigious
Middle East Studies Association, favors peaceful coexistence of
Palestinians and Israelis, and seeks a solution to the conflict based
on the principles of human rights and international law. His work has
triggered death threats; one caller said, ``You know what happened to
Daniel Pearl. . . . The people who are sympathetic are the first ones
to go.''

Crazy American - favoring Human Rights! What precedent is their in our legal system for the idea that people have inalienable rights and that governmental systems should support that?

But without irony: If thought leaders in research institutions can't explore all aspects of human endeavor in an environment that's safe, and if people studying at the top academic institutions in our country aren't intellectually skeptical enough to be able to judge their faculty's teaching with a critical eye, then the United States has truly lost any hope at intellectual leadership.

Here's an old blog entry in Informed Comment that discusses the people in question. Note the persistence of the persecutory activities of this group led by Pipes and Horowitz, and the enormous funding from a single donor for the purposes of harassing individuals.

As a liberal Jew from Los Angeles, I appreciate Juan Cole's exhortation that moderate or liberal Jews need to be as careful that their religious charity supports the secular vision they have as any moderate or liberal of any religion.

Someone I met at a DonorsChoose fundraiser when they were up for the Amazon award recently began blogging. She's a 3rd grade teacher in an East Oakland (read: extremely challenging environment) elementary school. She was raised a white suburbanite.

I posted the existence to a blog where someone with whom I've butted heads about "market forces" and their use in the educational context before. He responded positively about the use of technology to facilitate transparency - definitely a point of agreement for us. How else do you help people who have managed to create a relatively safe and positive life for themselves and their families to gainfully -- because it affects us all -- immerse themselves in the often unsafe and traumatic lives of East Oakland 8 year olds?

But it got me thinking: clearly there's a human need when the problems are bigger than I, as a single person, can manage, to look to a higher power, whether that's God, market forces, individualism, communism, equity, or something else. Looking for a -- hopefully single -- overriding force that, once restrictions are removed, will realign the world and make things somehow solve whatever the problem is.

I think that's now the project at hand, Finance 2.0 or whatever it's called: what are the forces that act on the world. How do they interact; what are their components? And how to we parameterize, measure, track, and experiment with them?

It took years for physicists to realize that electricity was related to magnetism, and that vision was related to both; or to understand that classical mechanics was only relevant at a particular scale (much bigger than an atom) and rate (much slower than the speed of light). Now long past that, physics has become math, and the intention is to unify the conceptualization of fundmental forces.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than to note that a force is something that was originally observed, and then in the physical world what became relevant was how the force was mediated. Is financial economics mediated by money? Is value creation mediated by man-hours of labor? Is knowledge mediated by hours in the classroom?

To the extent that physical forces are "potential wells" (think of a ball rolling downhill to the bottom of a depression) are people potential wells in need-space? Needspace would of course be comprised of physical, emotional, social, intellectual and possibly other needs. What mediates those needs (well, money certainly; but obviously less concrete things as well)? Then the next question is what acts on needspace (i.e. cultural expectations, historical need-fulfillment, etc.)

The nanny media, even more prudish since 9/11, covers our millions of
eyes to protect us from our own icky deeds. In Afghanistan in 2001,
while covering a war that had officially killed 12 civilians, I watched
a colleague from a major television network collate footage of a B-52
bombing indiscriminately obliterating a civilian neighborhood. "If
people saw what bombing looks like here on the ground," he observed as
body parts and burning houses and screaming children filled the screen,
"they would demand an end to it. Which is why this will never air on
American television." But other countries don't have our nanny media.
Europeans and Arabs see the horror wreaked in our name on their
airwaves, assume that we see the same imagery and hate us for not
giving a damn.America's self-censors make anti-Americanism worse.

From a speech by Barack Obama: It’s the timidity of politics that’s holding us back right now – the
politics of can’t-do and oh-well. An energy crisis that jeopardizes our
security and our economy? No magic wand to fix it, we’re told.
Thousands of jobs vanishing overseas? It’s actually healthier for the
economy that way. Three days late to the worst natural disaster in
American history? Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.

And of course, if nothing can be done to solve the problems we face, if
we have no collective responsibility to look out for one another, then
the next logical step is to give everyone one big refund on their
government – divvy it up into individual tax breaks, hand ‘em out, and
encourage everyone to go buy their own health care, their own
retirement plan, their own child care, their own schools, their own
roads, their own levees…

We know this as the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been
another term for it – Social Darwinism – every man or women for him or
herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may
rise faster than they can afford – tough luck. It allows us to say to
the child who was born into poverty – pull yourself up by your
bootstraps. It let’s us say to the workers who lose their job when the
factory shuts down – you’re on your own.

But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history. Yes, our
greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a
belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of
mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in
the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot
at opportunity.

I read about the "attention" economy. The idea is that information is not in any way scarce, so it can't be the basis of an economy; it's attention that's scarce.

The analogy made by the author is the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and I admit to being utterly ignorant of that process. However, I do nevertheless feel the need to ask the question: I guess if you're poor, you can pay a lot of attention to a rich person and they'll feed you?

Nope, it works backwards: if you're poor and you can GET the attention of a rich person, they'll feed you.